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Feminism

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Synonyms

Women’s liberation; Women’s movement; Women’s rights

Definition

“Advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of the equality of the sexes” (English Oxford Living Dictionaries).

Introduction

Feminism’s history is both a compilation of women’s experiences and a record of the different strategic interventions employed to argue women’s cause (Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History).

Arguably one of the most maligned and misunderstood of terms, “feminism” has a long, complex, and dynamic history. Prejudices and politics aside, far from being a monolithic ideology, feminism is more aptly characterized as “feminisms” owing to the various theoretical approaches associated with it, such as liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, socialist feminism, radical feminism, intersectional feminism, transfeminism, anarchist feminism, and transnational feminism. Depending on both its national and cultural context, feminism may also stress different aspects of, and remedies to women’s...

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Correspondence to Kathleen J. Waites .

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© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

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Waites, K.J. (2018). Feminism. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3179-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3179-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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